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Given the way Foxconn treats their employees, it makes me wonder if the robots will eventually revolt. (Terminator theme music)

They will clandestinely put a detonator into every Li-Ion battery package installed in the manufactured devices. Then, one sunny day, all the 5G cell phones and tablets on the planet will detonate simultaneously...

Anyone who doesn't lose their head when they go off will be rendered unable to reproduce instead, allowing for a steady decline in the population.To deal with the labor shortfall, the commercial sector will increase demand for robotic replacements...

...So yes, some low skilled workers lost their jobs and were replaced by fewer better paid, more highly skilled workers, while the remainder ended up working at Walmart, often forced to match their peon's wage with government entitlement programs such as food stamps, TANF, and medicaid just to make ends meet.

Back in the 80's a lot of products were marked "Made in China" but were actually made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. All three can be considered "China" depending on your definition. Daewoo is from Korea, and their products are marked "Made in Korea", but we all know that "Korea" in this sense does not include "North Korea".

Many people refer to the main island of Great Britain as "England" when "England" is just the southern portion, not to be confused with Cornwall, Wales, or Scotland. But in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, and nationality, Taiwan is more "China" than Scotland will ever be "England". The major defining difference between ROC (Taiwan) and PRC (China) is political, as in who literally governs.

Given the cultural differences between China and the West, it will be interesting to see how the Chinese populace deals with automation replacing a significant chunk of the workforce. It hasn't always been a smooth, peaceful change here...

I never did understand why Americans were always lamenting about China taking all the manufacturing jobs. Seems like if we weren't losing them to the Chinese then we would have lost them to automation. Although now that automation is starting to replace the Chinese workforce as well, there's really no reason for American companies not to move their manufacturing back to the US and save on overseas shipping and export/import regulations and taxes.

China isn't communist. If it were, the government wouldn't be allowing a mega-corporation from their capitalist arch-nemesis to exploit their workers on their own soil to the point that guards have been placed on 24 hour watch to prevent suicides and installed netting to catch would-be suicide jumpers.

China isn't communist. If it were, the government wouldn't be allowing a mega-corporation from their capitalist arch-nemesis to exploit their workers on their own soil to the point that guards have been placed on 24 hour watch to prevent suicides and installed netting to catch would-be suicide jumpers.

Yes. If it was, they'd be working in slave labor camps until they died of starvation, the way the Chinese used to do it.

I can only be happy when humans are replaced by machines to do repetitive, menial and hazardous tasks. In the future, nobody will have to do things like that. People will enjoy a comfortable life with lots of leisure and plenty of time to do things that make them fulfilled, instead of slaving for 16 hours a day.

I can only be happy when humans are replaced by machines to do repetitive, menial and hazardous tasks. In the future, nobody will have to do things like that. People will enjoy a comfortable life with lots of leisure and plenty of time to do things that make them fulfilled, instead of slaving for 16 hours a day.

I expect without Star Trek replicators, the future will rather instead look like that two-part episode of DS9 where Sisko went back in time and ended up in the ghetto. You know, the ghetto, where the vast masses in your utopian vision will end up, whilst the privileged few complain about the eye sore from their comfortable life of leisure.

When all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots, and there is no work for the millions of displaced workers they are going to find unexpected ways to spend their forced leisure time, such as developing a newfound love of pitchforks, machetes, rope and guillotines.. and an unhealthy obsession with the "Job Creators" who created a new life of misery for them.

When most repetitive work is done by machines and productivity goes sky-high, unemployment will not rise at all. Society will just focus on other tasks that were previously not achievable. Automation began 100 years ago and it hasn't caused mass unemployment.

I seriously doubt that more than 20% of the world population is capable of sustained creative or academic endeavors, especially not self-motivated and self-directed ones. Let's just hope that this is a Rider's of the Purple Wage dystopia, and not the Eloi and Morlocks kind.

Oh come on, robots aren't the cause of that unemployment. The cause of that unemployment is employers being cheap and hiring one guy to do the work of five workers, as opposed to five workers.My line of work is not possible to a machine, and yet unemployment runs wild in the sector because only one guy gets hired instead of a team.

But I don't blame you, popular media has always depicted robots as that evil world dominators that hate us fleshbags and will pew-pew us into submission, death, or slavery. In rea

The thing is, that guy CAN'T. That's why services are so shoddy, because they are overworking a lot of people in places where there should be a small squad taking care of business. It's like in places with huge networks and only a single sysadmin.As I say sysadmin I can say gardener, janitor, construction worker, cleaning staff, small security, bureaucrats and so on. It's just employers wanting the same or more for less.

I guess that's what happened with mechanisation of agriculture and the invention of the assembly line here in the Western countries. We live a life of misery, now. We were so much happier working 18 hour shifts in a shitty factory or plowing from dawn to dusk!

When all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots, and there is no work for the millions of displaced workers they are going to find unexpected ways to spend their forced leisure time, such as developing a newfound love of pitchforks, machetes, rope and guillotines.. and an unhealthy obsession with the "Job Creators" who created a new life of misery for them.

You're talking about a revolution in China. That's never happened before, has it? ***

In the past, there have been people with warnings like yours. There have always been more jobs, and we get nicer and nicer things.

We ran out of those jobs already. Sure, there are jobs for miracle surgeons, and for mathematicians who can solve unsolvable differential equations in their sleep, and for businessmen who can take a walking disaster of a company and make it into another Intel or Apple. But the thing is... nobody qualifies to take those jobs. This is why the country has so many of its citizens

One of the famous old economists (Smith, or Keynes, someone like that) also predicted that increased productivity would inevitably lead to the end of work, with everyone free to pursue leisure activities, enjoying unparalleled prosperity. But it doesn't seem to work out that way; those for whom there is no more work live in grinding poverty, while the majority of those who do work, work longer hours than ever. (The work is, however, by and large physically less taxing and more enjoyable.)

I'll have egg on my face when the robot army builds massive floating cities.

More like space habitats, which can easily provide many times as much land area as every planet in the solar system. Land on Earth won't have much value in a century or two.

Ok, that's the start of several science fiction stories. The rich leave for the space cities, leaving the poor behind on land and ocean going super-vessels. If anyone from the proletariat demonstrates talent, they get to emigrate to the stars after paying their dues. That was sort of the back-story in "Blade Runner", but it works for any rags-to-riches yarn.

I can only be happy when humans are replaced by machines to do repetitive, menial and hazardous tasks. In the future, nobody will have to do things like that. People will enjoy a comfortable life with lots of leisure and plenty of time to do things that make them fulfilled, instead of slaving for 16 hours a day.

In an equitable world, yes, that would be the outcome. In a world where artificial scarcity is created, one where you "must work in order to earn a living", there will be a huge unemployed and poor minority, or even majority. I do hope that the former scenario folds out. But looking at the american society, where people would rather be poor than not have someone even poorer to look down on, where they would rather everybody pays onerous student loans for most of their productive lives, because "I had it tough, so it's only fair that everybody else, in perpetuity, has it", where they'll "move to Canada" because of Obama's healthcare reform... well, it doesn't induce much hope.

I think we all hope it's a joke. I heard on the radio that Jet Blue was offering free flights to people who said they'd leave the country if Obama was elected, I wonder how many people took them up on that.

People will have a comfortable life with plenty of time to do creative work not when we have machines working for us, but only if there is a fair distribution of wealth.

Machines working for us improves productivity. If you distribute the productivity gains fairly, then indeed "people will have a comfortable life with plenty of time to do creative work". Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world. However, I think the latter is not sustainable. And I hope so...

If you distribute the productivity gains fairly,... Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world.

What prevents individuals from designing and building open-source robots and using them for their own productivity? I can imagine a garden bot that grows food, and a garage bot that builds furniture, and a community "production center" that works like a credit union - many members contributing smaller amounts to buy the more expensive items, and can then borrow them as needed, or use them in place to produce stuff they can't make at home.

Bullshit. We enjoy a great standard of living in modern western societies. We no longer work 18-hour shifts in dangerous factories full of smoke. Yet, we've found something to do with all that "spare time" we got.

Seems to me that society will be productive enough that those people will make a living anyway without having to work for it. Not as glamorous as more intelligent people, though. And they can pursue stupid and repetitive hobbies to keep busy.

You just offended 49% of the Americans who voted for Romney, you insensitive clod!

Didn't you know that already 47% of Americans see themselves as victims and think they are entitled to basic necessities of life? What's going to happen when 1.5 billion Chinese start expecting a daily ration of food when they are hungry, a wheel chair when they are disabled, or a soft bed and blanket when they are sick? Even the thought of people expecting such handouts without working three full-time jobs is repulsive to a

If all the manual work is done by robots, the productivity will be awesome. You don't even have to look a lot further. Think about all the welfare the Industrial Revolution brought to the developed countries in the 20th century.

In light of such a system, where the few who own the means of production are capable of disenfranchising and exploiting all others, I propose an alternative economic system that the Chinese can implement, in order to prevent the exploitation of the common man by the wealthy. One where the means of production are owned by the state, which represents the collective will of the people...

Once upon a time, we out-and-out had slaves.Then we freed them, sort of, and rehired them at almost-subsistence wages as sharecroppers.Then we moved to off-shore workers, currently in a practically nonexistent standard of living, happy to have any sort of job.Around the same time we also started in with illegal immigrants, again happy to have any sort of job, and more importantly, no ability to complain.(Sometimes I think there's a movement afoot to push US workers into that last group - happy to have any sort of job, no ability to complain. That certainly seems to be the direction we've been headed, even without any sort of conspiracy.)

So aren't robots simply the next step in that kind of progression?

With this in mind, the real question becomes, how smart does the robot have to become before we achieve true artificial intelligence, and it really is a slave, at which point the only ethical thing to do is to free it.

I know my earlier mumblings were US centric, and these robots are in China. But I don't think the US is unique in this kind of progression, and given the fact that we've moved our robot-capable workload offshore, that makes it logical that this kind of thing would be done offshore first.

"robots" aren't smart, by definition they simply perform per-programmed repetitive tasks; they're just a piece of hardware following some software instructions. You're thinking of an "automaton" which is a self-operating machine. When most people think "robot" they're actually thinking of the stereotypical sci-fi Android, which is an automaton with human characteristics. When manufacturers say robot they mean... robot, not android, not automaton... robot

Robots have been used in manufacturing for years, both in the US and abroad. In general though manufacturing moved off-shore because the human labor was so cheap it was even more cost effective than buying and maintaining robots domestically. If China is moving towards robots it only means that their human labor force is no longer cost effective, and will likely mean that a lot more manufacturing will move back to being domestic (the cost of running a robot locally is hardly different than the cost of running a robot off-shore). About the only reason to continue manufacturing in China at that point would be the proximity to the production of other components (which will likely become less of an issue over time) and availability of raw materials (which varies from industry to industry, country to country).

I would add "today" somewhere in your first sentence. I'm sure that at some point there will be a growing desire for a "learning robot" that doesn't need all of that pesky detailed programming. So very likely robots will "evolve" to become automatons, though most likely non-anthropomorphic. (At some point it wouldn't even surprise me to see a decidedly non-human automaton sporting a face somewhere, for the comfort of the humans. Or how about a red hemisphere in a black rectangular panel?)

Unless Im missing something, the reason so many of our electronics are made in China is the cheap labor.Presumably the Chinese wouldnt be replacing their labor force with robots if they werent cheaper yet.

They do exist in the US, most US manufacturing is done by robots. The only reason we have things made in China is because Chinese labor is still cheaper than US robots. 10,000 laborers being replaced by one Chinese manufacturer is hardly enough to dramatically shift costs, but it is a sign of things to come. If the trend continues we could see thing shifting back within 5-10 years.

Even still there are lots of other costs involved that still benefit China:

I'd like to point out that Foxconn is not Chinese, it's Taiwanese. Their Chinese name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., but like most Taiwanese they operate under a Westernized, Foxconn, name for the sake of international business. They have factories in Eastern Europe, South America and elsewhere in Asia other than China.

They do have a heavy presence in China for obvious reasons. It's close to their home base in Taiwan, but much cheaper for manufacturing and there's no language barrier. That said, there are short-comings to a Taiwanese company doing business in China. Foxconn's business practices are standard amongst Chinese companies. In fact, conditions and pay are almost always better at foreign companies, which is why Chinese workers tend to flock to them.

Not that things are ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Even in a corporate environment management tends to treat office workers like crap, by American standards. But the same could be said about companies all over Asia.

I think the important thing here is that while China is normally very quick to quash protests they've been surprisingly lax with what's happened at Foxconn. Given that Foxconn manufactures a significant percentage of the world's electronics I'd expect the reports of oppressive conditions to be more widespread. Either clients have more say in the manufacturing process than we realize, which doesn't speak well for Apple, or the Chinese government is taking advantage of this situation. We've got a Taiwanese company manufacturing products for one of the most desirable pieces of consumer electronics in the world. Given China's own economic problems, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Now, the problem here is that I would have expected that one of the fundamental reasons for outsourcing manufacturing costs is reduced labor costs. If workers are going to be replaced by robots that benefit evaporates. Do the cost savings elsewhere continue to outweigh inflation, a long supply chain and increasingly expensive shipping costs? I suppose they may for now, but I don't expect that to continue, which is probably why Foxconn has operations in South America. I expect we're going to see a lot more of our electronics coming from Mexico or Brazil.

Bender: You humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.Fry: What are you talking about? There's all kinds of robots down there.Bender: Yeah, doing crap work! They're bat boys, ball polishers, sprinkler systems. But how many robot managers are there?Fry: Eleven?Bender: Zero! (He throws his bottle on the floor and it breaks. A small robot comes out and cleans it up.) And what a surprise! Look who's scraping up the filth! Is it a human child? I wish!

When a robot replaces an MBA. Right now, robots are only useful at the lowest rung of business -- the factory floor worker.

But when robots finally get into management, that's when you'll hear the screaming as thousands of coddled, bonused, outsourcers finally get what's coming to them...

Like, notice the housing crisis wasn't a crisis until it started to affect boomers and upper middle class? For 2 years before the crisis, lower middle class and poor were getting "underwater" in their mortgages, but it wasn'

It has been shown over and over again, for the past 200 years, that there is no such thing as a "robot". There is always a person inside controlling the movements. This is just a ploy by Foxconn to appease human rights advocates.

Keep dreaming; labor costs are a pretty small part of the problem with manufacturing moving overseas. Chinese factories staffed by robots will still spew untreated toxic waste into their rivers and skies. Until everyone there either dies of exposure or they clean up their act, they'll have a huge price advantage.

Not to mention that China has been scouring the world cornering the market for sources of raw materials, such as minerals, timber, crops, oil, etc - especially in Africa and South America. They even have rigs drilling oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Combined with the wealth of untapped resources within their own borders, China is poised to set the base price for the entire world's economy for the foreseeable future, with or without mass labor.

Having worked at a few Mom and Pop stores in my life I have no sympathy for them getting run out of business. The vast majority of them have zero business sense. I've heard people go on and on about supporting some local small businesses but they generally have terrible customer service and I won't go back.